There's no sunrise in sight yet, only a slightly paler night: IDC reckons a lame uptick in convertibles and slim laptops will slow the PC market's collapse.
Convertible and slim, sorry, “ultra slim” laptops will make up 63 per cent of notebook shipments by 2020, IDC reckons (by that time, Vulture South wonders, how many new …

A low-end notebook drought is likely coming to a town near you, multiple analysts and tech distributors have told The Reg.
NAND flash is one component that has been in short supply in recent months, and glass panel manufacturers are shifting priority to higher margin areas including TVs, sources told us.
Tim Coulling, senior …

2016 will forever be remembered for the Brexit vote, the Donald's presidential victory and maybe, just maybe, the year that Acer's bottom line recovery started in earnest. OK, the last one is a long shot.
The Taiwanese notebook business has reported calendar Q3 results, and while the top line continued to slide on the prior …

GitHub Enterprise is scheduled to get a version bump on Wednesday that will bring code reviews, project organization, and workflow visualization capabilities.
Introduced in 2011, GitHub Enterprise provides Git version control on GitHub, on premises, or via private cloud, with a variety of bells and whistles that matter to …

Mobile phone users can access Nexsan's Unity storage array, and Nexsan has added web access apps for laptops and desktops.
Unity users can access files on the array via iOS and Android mobile phone apps, and by using browser access on their notebook computers or a desktop one. They can do this anywhere there is internet access …

Intel has released a tiny, single-sided and heavily read-optimised SDD for server use in data centres.
The P3100 is an M.2 design (22 x 80mm) built from 3D TLC (3bits/cell) NAND. This format has begun appearing in tablets, thin notebooks and desktops as it doesn't take up much space and the use of TLC (3bits/cell) NAND means …

+Comment
WD's disk and SanDisk-boosted flash sales boomed as overall revenues in its first fiscal 2017 quarter rose to $4.7bn, up 40.6 per cent on the year-ago $3.4bn. But it reported a net $366m loss.
Why a loss? A year ago it made a profit of $283m on lower revenues. This time around there were charges associated with WD’s recent …

Apple once again saw revenues drop, as 45.5 million iPhone 7 sales were not enough to boost its fourth-quarter earnings.
CEO Tim Cook talked up the particularly strong performance of Apple's internet services while glossing over another quarter of falling revenues.
"Our strong September quarter results cap a very successful …

Comment
We've learnt how the EMC organisation has been fitted into its new Dell house, at least at a top exec and product level, and here is an org chart set to show what we believe we know.
At the top is Dell Technologies, and that's split into seven product area entities. Dell Client Solutions is the notebook and PC business unit. …

On Tuesday, Intel said it expects to bank in the final quarter of the year $15.7bn in sales, plus or minus $500m. That's a billion-dollar swing.
Two days later, on Thursday, AMD proudly revealed that its entire revenue for the three months to September 24 was $1.3bn. Just over a billion dollars. AMD is little more than …

With the launch of PlayStation's VR headset, we are clearly entering a brave new world of virtual reality – everything from the low-end Google Daydream to the far-too-expensive Oculus Rift.
But while interest has been focused on the gaming possibilities, an undercurrent of filmmakers has started exploring the storytelling …

Lenovo exec and its one-time UK boss Dave McQuarrie has upped sticks after years aboard the Chinese PC maker with HP Inc tipped to be his next destination.
McQuarrie ran the EMEA notebook division when he joined from Dell in 2008, before taking on other senior posts; chief operating officer; Western Europe veep of SMB, …

Sysadmin blog
What works for 100 users frequently doesn't work for 10,000. The same is true in reverse, however, there are far fewer vendors worrying about tailoring software designed for the enterprise to the needs of the SMB. True mass market software needs to walk the tightrope between both worlds, and very little of it succeeds.
Let's …

A student at Kennesaw State University in Georgia is accused of hacking into his professor's computer to improve his grades.
Chase Arthur Hughes, 19, was arrested and charged this week after allegedly raiding the university's computers in May. The teen made a number of alterations to his grades, and those of his friends, for …

Video
Peripherals builder Anker has issued a recall after researchers found that one of its USB-C cables could potentially cause serious damage to connected hardware.
Researcher Nathan K found that the Anker PowerLine USB-C cables (model A8185011) used an improper method of identifying themselves, presenting as a device. This, in …

HP Inc says it will move forward with its plans to cut costs and refocus its business as it posted better than expected quarterly numbers.
For the three months to July 31, Q3 of its 2016 fiscal year, the printers and PCs half of the HP split reported:
Revenues of $11.9bn were down four per cent on the year-ago total of $12. …

Over-the-hill PC maker Acer is still under-performing, its latest set of shrinking product sales figures have confirmed.
The Taiwanese biz, among the two biggest shifters of notebooks in Europe a decade ago, is still searching to regain the formula that propelled it – but people just aren’t buying cheap lappies in the volumes …

California could soon become the first US state to pass laws limiting the power consumption of computers sold within its borders.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the California Energy Commission (CEC) wants to, by the end of the year, require PCs and monitors sold in Cali to use way less energy.
The report cites a …

Toshiba has produced a tiny but bigger SSD for tablets and ultrathins by adding TLC 3D NAND to its BG1 SSD card product line, and doubling its capacity.
The BG1 was introduced in August 2015 as a 256GB NVMe M.2 product. This product had an edge connector and was inserted into a socket.
The actual chip was affixed to the M.2 …

Backgrounder
Seagate is seeing the storage market shift from client server to mobile cloud applications and storage environments. Although responding to this, it is encouraged by the capacity needs of the remaining PC client as well as significant growth in non-PC-client devices and applications.
It talks of a new customer base that …

Seagate has beaten its own preliminary fiscal 2016 fourth quarter estimate of $2.65bn revenues with a $2.7bn quarter. Still, this was 6.9 per cent less than a year ago, although 3.8 per cent up on the third quarter.
Profits were $70m, 49 per cent less than a year ago but a whole, thumping lot better than last quarter's $21m …

Sysadmin blog
Microsoft Office remains one of the most important software products available, despite some rather nasty flaws. For me, Microsoft Office and video games anchor me to Windows. While video games seem set to remain largely Windows-only for the foreseeable future, Office is losing its grip.
For a long time, I used Office because …

UK catalogue store chain Argos has changed shop passwords for its drop-off store facility after a Reg reader inadvertently discovered staff relied on weak in-store access credentials to service orders.
The reader – who asked not to be named – came across the issue when she went to send two eBay parcels via the Argos drop-off …

Stob
Hurrah! Summer is at last well under way, so how better to pass the weekends than pulling the curtains on the rainscape, lolling on the sofa and inhaling a few dozen hours of downloaded TV? I am aware that such an introduction sets up certain expectations.
However, rather than treat you to ill-informed speculation regarding …

Seagate is closing down its factory in Havant on the south coast of the UK and axing 327 jobs. The redundancies are part of a renewed focus by the Californian giant on its disk drive technology roadmap to boost revenues and profitability.
The Havant closure is part of the restructuring announced earlier this month, along with …

It is a Friday and El Reg is pleased to be able to answer the burning question on the lips of readers across the land - just how did PC sales via distribution do in the second quarter? They went well.
Though retailers and wholesalers bought in stock conservatively, as recorded by Gartner and IDC, channel analyst Context …

AMD fans are over the moon today as their favorite processor designer has sold more chips than expected in the three months to June 25.
The Sunnyvale, California, biz beat analysts' estimates on revenue and earnings per share in a billion-dollar quarter that ended in the black rather than the usual red: the Radeon maker banked …

Analysis
Intel's stock price fell on Wednesday after it became clear the processor maker is not selling quite as many server processor chips as investors had hoped.
The Silicon Valley giant reckons its CPU sales into data centers will hit double-digit growth by the end of the year. So far, with half the year gone, we're staring at mid- …

Apple has been granted a patent that suggests its future MacBooks will come with built-in phone hardware, giving the notebooks mobile broadband connectivity.
The patent, granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office, describes a method for embedding high-speed LTE hardware into the shell of a notebook computer, using the …

Comment
Seagate has announced its latest quarterly results will be unexpectedly good but there will be employee bloodshed. Another 6,500 layoffs on top of the 1,600 announced in June will take place.
WDC did say it was cutting 507 US staff in June but these are the tip of an expected iceberg, which will see thousands of positions …

Dell had an unremarkable Q1 of fiscal 2017, with its parent Denali Holding Inc today reporting revenues down 2 per cent year on the year to $12.5bn, but greatly reduced operating losses, trimmed 52 per cent from $335m to $161m.
The company burned through $63m in cash in the three months ended April 29 but this pointed to " …

Lenovo is warning users to uninstall its Accelerator support application after it was revealed to have what it says are serious interception vulnerabilities.
The company is one of five vendors caught pre-installing dangerously-vulnerable OEM software.
Duo Security researcher Mikhail Davidov reported the holes that would allow …

SanDisk has put out a 128GB smartphone USB stick.
The lengthily named Ultra Dual Drive USB Type-C flash drive (UDDUTCD?) has one reversible USB Type-C connector and one standard USB (Type-A) connector. It has a retractable design, and USB 3.1 performance of up to 150MB/sec. It’s intended for moving photos, videos and files …

Updated
Samsung is advising customers against succumbing to Microsoft’s nagging and installing Windows 10.
The consumer electronics giant's support staff have admitted drivers for its PCs still don’t work with Microsoft's newest operating system and told customers they should simply not make the upgrade.
That’s nearly a year after …

Just like Leonardo DiCaprio and his photogenic pals crafted dream worlds out of dream worlds in the hit flick Inception, we're told HP Ink prints its 3D printers using its 3D printers.
Take one of HP Ink's new and expensive 3D printers, and you can print out half of the components needed to build another one, CEO Dion Weisler …

The PC market is doomed. We know this. You know this. Gartner knows this, but it reckons vendors can bleed out a few more pennies if they start selling high-end rigs for gamers.
"PCs are no longer the first or only devices users are choosing for internet access," said Meike Escherich, principal research analyst at Gartner. …

Google's Chrome displaced Internet Explorer as the top desktop browser by market share in April.
This according to data from web monitors at Net Applications, which has Chrome narrowly edging out IE to win the top market share spot amongst desktop and notebook users. Net Applications lumps IE and Edge into the same figure. …

+Comment
As expected, Seagate's revenues totaled $2.6bn in the three months to April 1, the third quarter [PDF] in its fiscal 2016, down 21 per cent year-on-year.
And as anticipated, it made a $21m loss – its first loss in many many quarters and way down from the year-ago's $291m profit.
On Friday, as the results for Q3 were published …

Microsoft last year effectively murdered one part of the mobile PC market that was going gangbusters - Windows with Bing (WwB) - and unsurprisingly this is now reflected in weaker sales across Western Europe.
The low-cost WwB portables reached distributors by summer '14, designed to counter what was seen as a growing threat to …

The sky is not falling. This is not as bad for Apple as 2003 or 1996. But neither does Apple walk on water.
For the first time in 13 years, Apple’s reported falling revenue – down 13 per in the last three months to $50.6bn.
Cruelly, it was the growth engine that was winding down: iPhone sales fell for the first time in the …

+Comment
A sea change is looming in the disk drive industry as drive spindle motor maker Nidec reduces its total disk drive demand number.
Nidec is a Japanese company and has the largest market share of any such manufacturer.
It foresees demand for about 400 million units in 2016, down 13 per cent from its previous October 2015 …

About a year ago, we asked you to pray for AMD. It's working.
AMD has announced a joint venture with a Chinese manufacturer that will churn out server processors using mini-Chipzilla's technologies in the Middle Kingdom. It also said it will bank about $1.5bn from three new games console chips over the next three or four years …

Toshiba has thinned is L200 500GB internal drive, shaving off 26 per cent of its thickness, so it takes up less space in notebooks and gaming consoles.
The L200 Slim, with its 7mm z-height, has the same 500GB capacity as the thicker L200 with its 9.5mm z-height. It also sports the same 92g weight, but it only has an 8MB buffer …

Intel will axe 12,000 employees globally – more than one in ten of its workforce – as it moves further away from being a PC chip company.
The layoffs are among the biggest into the company's history, and come as PC industry continues to tank harder than Intel expected.
The Santa Clara-based biz sees a lot of growth in the …

Acer and Lenovo's PC sales tumbled during the first three months of 2016 as the EMEA market contracted by 10 per cent, according to Gartner.
While everybody except Asus was down compared to 12 months ago, Acer was the single biggest loser.
The ailing notebook maker shipped 26.4 per cent fewer PCs – 1.5m units – leaving it …

+Comment
Seagate has issued an early warning that its third fy2016 quarter revenue will be off by $100m from its forecast of $2.7bn.
The company expects to report revenue of approximately $2.6bn and non-GAAP gross margin of approximately 23 per cent, for the quarter which ended April 1 – no, this is not a late April Fool joke. The …